Value and Hue

So we’re going to time jump here a little, I’ve done several other paintings with ArtRage in the last month or so and as I’ve been on my quest for a more painterly look I’ve been reading quite a bit about color choice etc. It seems that color is a much more in depth subject than I’d ever considered it to be with complimentary colors, primaries and so on, I remember some of this stuff from grade school but never gave it the respect or attention it deserved.

One of my tendencies is to use transparent washes of black to darken a given color in an image to achieve the shadow or blending I’m looking for. Little did I know that black has one characteristic that isn’t altogether desirable, that is, it mutes the vibrancy of most colors. So I decided I’d have to learn to do without black which means I need more hues of a particular color, fortunately thanks to the Scaps in ArtRage I’m able to mix my own colors in a pretty traditional media way even though I’ve never actually done it with physical paint. The color picker would also work for this I assume by adjusting the hue slider though I didn’t try it out. My goal was to take titanium white and one other color and paint a picture of an apple using just various hues of said color without using any black. I was only partially successful because I ended up using black for the stem of the apple because I couldn’t get it to look how I wanted without it. This whole painting was very educational as it taught me a lot about value, I intend to do several more like it of different subjects.

I also used more of a painterly approach to this one resisting the urge to use the pallette knife to smooth things out. I used the square canvas 2 custom brush that comes standard with ArtRage 5 and is simply a delight to work with. Kudos to its creator I bought his other brush packs based on the usefulness of that brush alone.